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Nissan Leaf battery. Photo: Nissan Matching the Chevy Volt As predicted here, Nissan has decided to match GM and offer a 8-year/100k miles warranty on the battery pack of its LEAF electric car. It will be great for early adopters who will have one less thing to worry about (at least for the first 8 years or 100k miles), and it will be great for the transition to electrified transportation.... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Pavemart.com John previously wrote about how rural roads are going back to the stone age because of the cost of asphalt. The sticky black liquid was the bottom of the barrel in the oil industry, often sold at a loss, to be mixed with aggregates and used for paving. (5% asphalt to 95% aggregate, the asphalt is the glue that holds it together). ... Read the full story on TreeHugger

It will be another two years before Ashton Stark can get his driver's license, but that's not stopping the 14-year-old from looking to the future -- and in more ways than one. With a keen sense of green and a little engineering savvy, Ashton succeeded in transforming his grandfather's 1972 Volkswagen Beetle into a cleaning running, all-electric eco-vehicle. ... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Slightly more than a quarter the existing taxi fleet is made up of hybrid vehicles already. Photo: Brian Snelson via flickr. A quick (and hopefully not final) update in the ongoing legal saga around New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan to convert the city's taxi fleet over to hybrid vehicles. As the New York Times reports, ... Read the full story on TreeHugger

There are plenty of reasons that America's transportation infrastructure needs retooling -- one of them is that highways are increasingly seeing a wide range of problems, from congestion to falling into disrepair. But there are even more blunt problems with highways -- they're killing pedestrians, often at higher rates than ever before. This great video details how Atlanta's Buford highway has become more and more deadly as more of the surrounding residents have increasingly relied on walking as a form of transportation. ... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photos: Paseo a Ciegas Facebook page. In a very interesting initiative that began last January, a group of three non governmental organizations from Mexico City are organizing bike rides for the blind and visually impaired. The rides are guided by volunteers on tandem bikes, and are offered on Sunday mornings, when a few streets in the historical center of the city are closed for pedestrians and human powered vehicles. What does this do for these people? More than you would think. Find out in... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: GM Chevrolet Dealers in Launch Markets are Taking Reservations After years of waiting, we finally know how much the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid will be sold for: The Volt's MSRP will start at $41,000 ($33,500 net of the full federal tax credit, which ranges from $0-$7,500) including a destination freight charge of $720. GM will also be offering a lease option with monthly payments of about $350 for 36 months, with $2,500 down. Read on for more details.... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: Flickr, CC UPS has just set itself a new fuel-efficiency goal for all of its "package delivery fleet", aiming for a 20% increase in MPG between the years 2000 and 2020. They are already well underway, with a 10% increase in mileage for their fleet of 60,000 ground vehicles between 2000 and 2009. The number might seem a bit abstract, but in practice it means that despite the fact that UPS drivers logged 77.3 million more miles than in 2009 than in 2000, they burned 3.2 million fewer gallons of fuel. Read on to find out some of the strategie... Read the full story on TreeHugger

One cyclist enjoys a ride on what may be the world's shortest bike path. Oh, wait, that was it? Image credit: Mark Sadowski/Flickr Well-designed urban bike paths are a cyclist's dream, making it easy for folks to ditch their cars for a more eco-friendly commute. Sometimes, however, it just doesn't seem worth the effort to build them at all. Even in the Read the full story on TreeHugger

photo via flickr General Motors Co. is making headlines for bringing forward the electric Volt later this year, but GM is also making green news by virtually eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from the air conditioning used in certain cars starting in 2013. GM says the move will reduce emissions from their vehicle's refrigeration systems by 99.7 percent compared with the current ... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Image: GM HFO-1234yf Will be Used in GM's 2013 Models We talk a lot about CO2 because it is the greenhouse gas that humanity produces in the biggest quantity, but there are many others that contribute to warming our planet. The refrigerant in automobile air conditioner units is one of those. It stays in the atmosphere for a long time if it leaks, and it is pretty effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere. That's why it's good news that GM, probably followed by other automakers, will start using a new refrigerant (HFO-1234yf, made by Honeywell Fluorine Prod... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: Porsche AG Porsche is Testing 3 Battery-Powered Electric Boxsters Almost all automakers are moving in the direction of electrification. This transition takes many forms (hybrids, plug-in hybrids, battery electric cars), but the goal is the same: To make cars more energy-efficient and make them less dependent on a single source of energy (oil vs. all the ways you can make electricity, including all the clean & renewable ones). Even Porsche, the German sports car maker, has been experimenting with electrons, starting with Read the full story on TreeHugger

photo: Glen via flickr Thinking about ways we can really start transitioning off oil has led me lately to thinking about how we're going to ship goods across oceans--which I'll delve into more in some future posts--but there's some interesting shipping information worth passing on (via Dot Earth and The Guardian) to start you think... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo credit A. Streeter. If Google's GMail is any indication, Google Maps Bike There may be in beta for a long, long time. And that's likely a good thing. Many of us encouraged creation of the bicycle mapping tool, are using it every day, and really appreciating it. However, we've also... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Image credit: ElectricAid Talk about electric vehicles and most people think of the Tesla Roadster, or maybe the more humble, but equally ground breaking Nissan Leaf. But there are probably hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles already out there in the world getting people from A to B in the form of Read the full story on TreeHugger

Image: Huffington Post The New York Times Columnist on the cost of air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: Making our country more energy efficient is not some green feel-good thing. Retired Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson, who was Gen. David Petraeus's senior logistician in Iraq, e-mailed to say that "over 1,000 Americans have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan hauling fuel to air-condition tents and buildings. If our military would simply insulate their structures, it would save billions of dollars and, more importantly, save lives of truc... Read the full story on TreeHugger

All images courtesy of Bloomberg Business Week OK, affordable might be a bit of an overstatement, unless you're one of the richer tree huggers out there. We've told you before about Mercedes-Benz's hybrid S400, but here's the interesting news: it turns out, at $88,825, the S400 is the least expensive car in the S-Class line the company has to offer.... Read the full story on TreeHugger

A rendering of the future system. Image credit: Amman BRT. Having already begun to reclaim its sidewalks for pedestrians, the city of Amman, Jordan is setting out to reclaim its streets from traffic chaos. The Jordan Times reported this month that construction is underway on a new Bus Rapid Transit system in centr... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Image Credit: !ola via Yoxi When challenged to come up with a way to inspire more people to bike for transportation in addition to recreation, three three "former non-bikers" from New York City proposed a campaign to focus on mutual respect between drivers and bikers. The team, calling itself "!ola," was one of four competitors in a contest sponsored by Yoxi, a new site dedicated to social innovation. In its debut competition, Yoxi (pronounced yo-see) posed this question: How can we make our cities more welcoming to bikers? H... Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: Qinetiq Thanks to Solar Power A week ago we wrote about the Zephyr "Eternal Aircraft", an unmanned solar plane that had just broken many records by staying up in the air for 7 days. Well, the Zephyr has finally landed at the US Army's Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona after 14 days and 24 minutes, setting a new record that will no doubt be broken the next time the Zephyr decides to take off (at this point, breaking records seems to only be a matter of being patient enough, since the so... Read the full story on TreeHugger